Wood floors remain popular for athletic facilities, particularly for basketball floors. In a typical hardwood floor, a wear layer of floorboards resides over a base, with a subfloor residing below the wear layer and above the base, and resilient pads residing between the subfloor and the base. The pads create space between the floor and the base, thereby minimizing moisture ontake by the subfloor or the floorboards, which are usually made of wood. The pads also provide a degree of cushioning, or resilience, for the floor. This minimizes the chances of athletic injury due to impact, and reduces wear and tear on the joints of athletes. If the structure does not include some mechanism for attachment to the base, the floor is said to be “free floating” relative to the base.
In some cases it is desirable to secure, or anchor, the floor to the base, primarily for better stability and also to minimize the potentially adverse effects of floorboard expansion and contraction. Such expansion and contraction can occur as a result of moisture ontake and/or egress that is caused by variations in humidity levels as the seasons of the year change. This moisture-caused expansion and contraction of floorboards adversely affects the performance uniformity of the floor. Thus, anchoring the floor helps to assure stability and uniformity in performance.
These dual objectives, to resiliently support the floorboards above the base and to anchor the floorboards to the base, are not easy to simultaneously achieve. Nonetheless, applicant has been successful in simultaneously achieving these dual objectives for several different types of hardwood floors. More specifically, U.S. Pat. No. 5,388,380, entitled “Anchored/Resilient Sleeper for Hardwood Floor System” discloses several anchoring arrangements for anchoring subfloor nailing strips to a base, with the nailing strips supported on pads above the base and anchored in a manner that does not pre-compress the pads beyond a static position. Also, U.S. Pat. No. 5,609,000, entitled “Anchored/Resilient Hardwood Floor System,” discloses additional structural variations that also simultaneously achieve these countervailing objectives.
For these types of floors, as perhaps with all floors, or perhaps any consumer products, there remains a high customer demand for better or equal performance at the same or at lower cost. In the floor business, this means that the customer desires a floor of high structural integrity at the lowest reasonable cost. For the floor supplier, this translates to an objective of supplying a floor of high structural integrity but with shorter installation time, easier handling and manufacture of the floor components, and also fewer floor components, but without adversely impacting the other attributes of the floor, such as anchoring and resiliency.